A Script A Day – Day 02/05

Continuing along, day 2’s task was to get stock quotes. Usually a pretty simple task once you find a data source to use. I settled on using YQL to query Yahoo Finance. This one has a few requirements (wget, hexdump, xsltproc) as bash is a bit limited.

Finishing up day 2’s script late just like day 1’s. I started this one pretty late, between perusing StackOverflow for code snippets (for things like URL escaping in bash) and actually setting up the final display was about 2 hours. The output is formatted with a pretty basic XSLT stylesheet. My XSLT is clearly rusty. As such, handling error messages could have been a little more elegant, but I also kinda want to sleep. As with the rest of the project, this has been added to the script-a-day repo.